Students
from Hopkins and several other schools are organizing an impromptu protest
against Trump this afternoon. This is what a sociology major sent me late last
night:

"I wanted to share two events tomorrow. At 4:30, a number of
Hopkins student groups are organizing a small rally outside of the library. At
5pm, we will be marching to link with the broader Baltimore-wide anti-Trump
protest, which is meeting at 33rd and Guilford."

‘The
old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of
monsters’, Antonio Gramsci.

Donald
J. Trump, the outsider billionaire, defeated Hillary R. Clinton, the insider
politician, in a stunning upset for the US presidency. All polls and all
pundits assumed that Clinton would win in a landslide. Confidence ran so high
that Clinton’s people in the Democratic Party felt that she might even win
traditionally Republican states – even Texas, the bastion of American
conservatism. It was suggested that Clinton could win the battleground states
of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, denying Trump any path to victory. As it
turned out, Trump won each of these states, comfortable in his victory.

Not
only did Trump win, but the Republican Party – in deep disarray about his
candidacy – retained the US House of Representatives, the US Senate and the
majority of the governorships. This means that the Republican Party will – from
January 2017 – control every major branch of US government. The electorate has
delivered, in other words, a mandate to the conservative political party.

Why
is this so?

It
has nothing to do with persona of Trump. After all, he is a billionaire who has
made his career by squandering the livelihoods of his workers, and disregarding
the well being of the people hurt by his real estate projects. In comments made
during the race, Trump disparaged non-white people, calling Mexicans rapists
and calling for a ban on Muslim immigration into the United States. His sharp
and nasty comments about women amplified his remove from the discourse of
polite society. He is ‘unfit to serve’, said the ruling class, which included
not only stalwarts of the Democratic Party but also of the Republican Party.
The Bush family – which has produced two Republican presidents – shunned Trump.
So did many of the Republicans who ran for the Senate. High-minded society saw
in Trump the worst instincts of humanity.

But
the vote for Trump did not likely come because he was endorsed by the Ku Klux
Klan, the oldest white supremacy group. Certainly Trump drew his support
largely from White voters – White men in particular, but also White women. Did
they vote for him because he disparaged Mexicans and women? My own reporting
showed that Trump’s support came to a significant extent for two reasons:
because he talked openly about a forgotten America and because he offered a
robust denunciation of unequal globalization.

Most
American politicians repeat the view that America is not only the greatest
country but that it is also going to remain eternally great. Trump’s slogan –
Make America Great Again – suggested that America was not great, but that it
was suffering. It is true that the statement had within it older lineages of
racist thinking, namely that it could be read as saying that America was great
when whites were fully in power. But this is not the only way to read the
slogan. It could also be read to say that there are ‘forgotten men and women of
our country’ – as Trump put it in rural Appalachia – ‘People who work hard but
who no longer have a voice’. When Trump’s team released that speech to the
press, the next line was written in capitals – ‘I AM YOUR VOICE’. The idea of
the ‘forgotten men and women’ has two histories. The first is from President F.
D. Roosevelt (FDR), who – in the aftermath of the Great Depression – called
upon the country to tend to the ‘forgotten man at the bottom of the economic
pyramid’. This was in 1932, as FDR pushed for an economic stimulus to prevent
both the rise of fascism and the rise of communism. The second is from
President Richard M. Nixon, who spoke of the ‘silent majority’, who – in the
aftermath of the ‘race riots’ of 1968 – referred to whites who resented the end
of formal racism in the US (Jim Crow) and who despised the anti-war movement.
In other words, the idea of the ‘forgotten’ person has roots in economic and
cultural politics. Trump refrained both these lineages in his speeches –
talking about the need to bring economic activity back to the forgotten parts
of rural and small town America and the need to address racist grievances
against immigrants and the newly enfranchised racial minorities. Resentment
along cultural grounds spilled over into disdain for Obama (a black man) and
Clinton (a white woman).

Trump’s
victory cannot be merely chalked off to resentment. The idea of the ‘forgotten
men and women’ suggests Trump’s quite forceful criticism of globalization – his
appeal to the dying factory towns and farming communities, the parts of the
country afflicted with desolation and opioid addition. His criticism of the
hemorrhaging of jobs was real and it went under the skin of neoliberal policy
prescriptions. No more blather about high-end jobs to replace the working-class
jobs – that is bewildering to a population with little access to higher
education. Themes raised by Bernie Sanders fit in with the bluster of Trump’s
critique. Large scale, buried unemployment, and failure to recover from the
credit crisis of 2008, came to the surface. Trump was the ventriloquist of
these themes.

Across
the Western world, from the United Kingdom’s Brexit Vote to the US vote for
Trump, a harsh, even monstrous, form of denunciation of neoliberalism has
emerged. The Left is weak in these parts and unable to capture the imagination
of the public with its more sober, historically based criticism of
neoliberalism. This is a criticism that rightly sees the problem, but then
whips into anti-immigrant xenophobia and racist hyperbole. The era of
neoliberalism is dead. That is clear with the victories across the Atlantic
world, but also in the tired statements of the neoliberal class towards the
real crisis of inequality. A new era is not born yet. It cannot be born without
the emergence of a robust Left. In the interim appear monsters – whether Boris
Johnson in the UK or Donald Trump in the US. This is the time of monsters.

The
last time a Republican won the US presidency, their candidate – George W. Bush
– was the epitome of neoliberal globalization. He pushed hard on the neoliberal
agenda already put in place by the Democratic standard-bearer of these views,
Bill Clinton. Rather than fight deindustrialization, they accelerated it.
Increased police and prisons domestically became the mirror image of increased
belligerence overseas. The collapse of the financial sector in 2008 and the
planetary wars after 9/11 sharpened the decline in the United States. Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton inherited the leadership of this dangerous policy
agenda.

Trump
and his confreres in Europe have no adequate answers to the problem. The team
around Trump has little idea about trade policy. Steve Moore of the Heritage
Foundation and Larry Kudlow of CNBC are Trump’s advisors on trade. Both live
within the consensus, pro-free trade and pro-globalization. Neither have a
problem with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) nor with the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). What they disagree with is the decision-making
process of these trade deals, not the deals themselves. Strikingly all that
they could offer – in a conversation with Ben White of Politico– is more robust
intellectual property protections, better protection of technology advances and
better negotiations of bilateral deals. No one in the pro-globalization wing of
the ruling elites would disagree with them. Trump raised the lid on the
failures of neo-liberalism, but his own team seems incoherent in its assessment
of how to go forward. In other words, a Trump presidency is fated to fail in
terms of its economic promises of bringing jobs to the heartland.

Which
means that Trump will only be able to deliver the harshest tonic of racism and
misogyny as alibis for the failures of his economic policy. He will not turn
his gaze on the banks, but he will look hostilely at multicultural policies and
at gestures to make the social order more tolerable. This will be attacked
directly. It is what his movement has evoked; the ghouls of intolerance will
now feel as if they have inherited the earth. Harshness will the way forward.

The
Democratic Party, certain of victory, will now plunge into political
depression. It could not defeat Trump! It will blame the Green Party and low
turnout – as Brecht sang, if you are unhappy with the result then ‘Would it not
be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect
another?’

The
miniscule American Left will have to dust off its electoral compromises and come
to terms with the need to defend the gains of the civil rights movement, but
also speak robustly against a trade policy that kills jobs and creates
forgotten people. It is the failure to be bold and clear in the language of
anti-neoliberalism that gave that space to Trump. Even Bernie Sanders was too
timid. Far more forthright and legible criticism is necessary. It is the only
way to push back against the Monsters.

Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity
College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books,
including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter(AK Press, 2012), The Poorer
Nations: A Possible History of the Global South(Verso, 2013) and The Death
of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution(University of California
Press, 2016). His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs